


Homecoming

by Sodding_Malfoy (Leafyleaf)



Series: Star Trek Bingo 2020 [1]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, Background Relationships, Character Study, Childhood, Gen, Introspection, Not Fitting In, Post-Canon, living without purpose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:41:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25982269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leafyleaf/pseuds/Sodding_Malfoy
Summary: Harry Kim is finally home. Voyager made it back to the Alpha Quadrant, he stands on the Earth that he was born on, and he is back with family he thought he'd never see again. But still, he can't help but feel out of place.Written for the Star Trek Bingo 2020, under the prompt 'Homecoming'.
Series: Star Trek Bingo 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1885774
Kudos: 13
Collections: Star Trek Bingo Summer 2020





	Homecoming

The cameras were like a pack of wolves, working together to make sure that nothing got away from them. Stepping out of the ship to thunderous applause, everyone blinking into the sunlight with quaking knees like rescue dogs experiencing the outside world for the first time. Fireworks exploding on high, everyone sobbing into each other's shirts as we reunited with friends we’d thought we would never see again. Kneeling on the floor in disbelieving reverence, kissing the dirt – the Earth – that we’d thought we would never be able to set foot on. The long-awaited return of the doomed starship Voyager. That’s what they showed on TV.

They brushed the rest of it under the rug. The real story wasn’t what the public wanted – the fairy tale was enough. We were hauled away for hushed interviews and interrogations from admirals I’d never even heard of, then stowed temporarily in low-end hotel rooms last renovated fifty years before we’d even been born. I thought at first that we’d be regarded at heroes. I thought we’d get swift promotions for our time in the field and then sent straight back out a few pips heavier, that I’d maybe even get my own command, but all they had for us were whispered conversations that ended whenever we entered the room.

When I first went home – properly home, to the house that I’d grown up in – I set my bags by the door as my mom eyed me tearfully and pulled me into a too-tight hug. Dad clapped me on the shoulder as her long pink fingernails speared into my back. She didn’t smell like a mom anymore. She smelled like an old lady, like dust and cabbage soup and tea with a mountain of sugar. I hardly recognised either of them at all, so different they were to the people I’d grown used to only seeing in my mind’s eye or, years after I’d given up hope of being reunited, on a viewscreen. They were almost strangers, but I knew I wasn’t the son they’d lost seven years ago either – I had deep age lines around my eyes and nightmares that followed me well into the daytime, haunted memories chasing after me and more baggage than a junker’s freighter.

I’d come back to my childhood home as though I could just step across the threshold and resume my life where I’d left off. I’d even assumed that my room would still be the same, as though I’d been gone for only a few hours, save for a film of dust that my parents couldn’t bear to go in and remove. A t-shirt thrown over the back of my desk chair, a Sherlock Holmes novel laid on my pillow ready to be picked up and read on from the bookmark. Reading real physical books was something I’d missed, a staple of my childhood, and since then I’d grown used to tired eyes and migraines from staring for too long at a PADD. This image had seemed so real inside my head that it took me a while to believe my eyes when I first walked in. In my mother’s defence, she had tried to tell me. I’d foolishly taken her stalwart efforts at hospitality and her steering me around as just a sign that she’d missed me, rather than her protecting me.

There was no space for me anymore. Not that the house had changed size, but they’d grown comfortable enough with my absence to compensate for it. Nothing of mine was still there, but instead the room was stocked with books, a writing desk and an artist’s easel. There was an ancient music machine called a ‘record player’ in the corner. They’d taken up so many new hobbies since I’d left to fill their waking hours with joy instead of heartbreak. They didn’t have to explain, because I understood; they hadn’t expected me to ever come home, just like I had given up hope of escaping the Delta Quadrant. For six years they’d presumed me dead, and had finished their mourning before we’d found a way to reach out to them. With me here, the life they had got used to was up in the air again. It just wasn’t fair.

I was sat across from my mother on the chaise-lounge with a cup of tea in my hand and she’d told me about the life I’d missed out on – although she didn’t quite phrase it like that. Her and my dad had taken up some form of Edosian line-dancing, which they were finding themselves quite adept at despite having only two legs. My cousin Harvey had graduated Starfleet Academy as a junior science officer, but my aunt Mathilde was scared to let him take placement on a space vessel after what had happened to me. What struck me most deeply and painfully though was that Libby, who I still saw behind my eyelids when the nightmares abated, had been married for a few years already to some older guy called Dylan, who’d given her a daughter and a safari park in Botswana. I’d always thought she would be my wife, even when I knew she must’ve moved on. The words were like phaser blasts to my chest.

A while later, stretching my legs in the market after being cooped up in Tom Paris’ spare room for weeks on end, I ran into her – into Libby. I saw her shock of brown hair, glistening radiantly in the light of the midday sun. She was just as I remembered her. Looking at her then was just like seeing her for the first time, when she was sitting in the wrong seat at the Ktarian music festival and asking if there was anything at all she could do to make it up to me. She was looking at star-studded fabrics, feeling them between her fingers as though the slightest variations in thickness and consistency would make or break the deal. I crossed the street and tapped her on the shoulder. When I touched her, even though through her shirt, I felt fireworks in my fingertips, like a turn-of-the-century light show. She turned and stepped aside (“sorry, am I in your way?”) with no recognition of me at all. Her eyes were as kind as those of a teacher, and she was as polite and formal as Captain Janeway always had been upon each instance of First Contact. She had clearly not been thinking of me at all, which made me a little embarrassed about how often my own thoughts had been centred on her. In the beginning, daydreams of Libby were all that had kept me sane. Selfishly, I’d hoped she’d had as many crying fits and sleepless nights as I had. Maybe that just proved I didn’t deserve her. 

I told myself I would move out of Tom’s house as quickly as possible. He had other things to worry about than me. It was obvious that he wanted to assume a normal family life, just as my parents had. B’elanna was always pottering about in the kitchen, making food for them both and blending up strange meaty concoctions for the baby – she said it was so much better and more filling to make it herself – while I stuck to the spare room like a recluse, trying to get drunk from replicated whiskey and cola. All I could be was a reminder of the ship and their bachelor(ette) days they were trying to leave behind. They were both trying to turn the page onto a new chapter of their lives, but I was a bookmark or a dog-eared corner threatening to pull them back.

I packed my bags one night – well, just one bag now, and my clarinet case. I had to get rid of a lot of things once I had nowhere to put them, and with the baby always sleeping or crying I hadn’t even looked at the clarinet in months. It was a beauty: the one I’d left at home all those years ago by accident, one of the only things my parents had kept to remember me by. There was a small part of me, though, a niggle at the back of my mind, that had grown more attached to the replicated one I’d relied on all those years, paid for with carefully conserved rations. Everything was too easy nowadays, and ridiculously hard.

Miral Paris was undoubtedly a lovely child, with leagues of dark brown hair to match her eyes and a grip maybe even stronger than her mother’s. She’d nearly ripped my finger clean off once when I’d tried to feed her a famous B’elanna Torres’ Pork and Apple Purée and not done so fast enough. The only problem was that she wasn’t mine – not that I had baby fever – and so I was just taking up time and energy that she should’ve been affording to her parents. A fourth wheel was the last thing any of them needed. So, one night, while they were singing Miral to sleep, I took my clarinet, two changes of clothes, and the PADD from which I was reading Huckleberry Finn, and I left.

There was a hotel room still available for me near where our ship was now permanently docked. All I had to do was give them a few days’ heads up. But for some reason, when I got to the hotel’s front door, I couldn’t lift my hand past the peeling paint to the rusty knocker. I knew nothing familiar or worthwhile awaited me inside. I looked to the new museum across the street.

There were pictures of her outside, and a viewscreen billboard with what looked like a live image feed. She was just sitting there. I could tell she was feeling just as lost as I was. She was supposed to be in space, flying free, new life and new civilisations and all that, and I was supposed to be right there making sure nothing stood in her way. Instead she was tethered in place, swarmed by people that didn’t belong there. Her tritanium exterior had been polished and buffed to an unnatural sheen, and every dent that had once given her character had been flattened out like new. She didn’t look like a starship at all. She was nothing but a tourist attraction.

Children ran up and down the stairs, clutching onto the metal handrails as they swung about and were watched wearily by their parents, who were waiting in line for admittance. Shuttles came and went as far as they could, bussing ten at a time up to the moon base where she was waiting with open arms. Without thinking on it for too long, I joined the queue, looking as nonchalant and uninteresting as I could. The woman in front of me tutted as someone else’s son nearly tripped over her foot.

“You think they’d have more respect, wouldn’t you?”

With a start, I realised she was talking to me. “Oh?”

“I can’t begin to imagine what this ship has gone through. Being allowed up there at all is an honour, but these kids are acting like it’s any other day out. They’ll be running around it like it’s a racetrack.”

I shrugged. “She’s seen worse. There were children aboard in the Delta Quadrant too, I don’t think she would mind having a few there now.”

“I don’t think you understand,” the woman said, looking down her nose at me from her higher step. “People died up there.”

I knew all too well what we’d lost. How many people – friends – had fallen to the Borg, the 8472, the Hirogen, space battles and ship malfunctions. I nodded in acknowledgement. “Yes, but people lived there too. Good people. She’s a starship, she needs people to give her a purpose, not to just look at her from afar.”

“Not anymore,” she shook her head at me. “It’s been through enough.”

Another shuttle landed, and the line crept forwards up the stairs. The woman stepped aboard and, when I moved to follow her, the attendant stopped me with a hand on my arm. I knew what he was seeing – my unkempt hair, my wrinkled clothes, the pack strung across my back. I realised with a jolt that he might just turn me away. He squinted as he scrutinised my face.

“Have I seen you before? Do you come often?”

I laughed, short and quiet. “You could say that.”

He waved me forward. My face wasn’t one that he would remember, having only been shown on the news for a few brief seconds along with the rest of Voyager’s survivors. I was after all only an ensign. It was mainly Captain Janeway and Commander Chakotay that were interviewed onscreen – they were the people the public knew, the faces of Voyager. The man would likely never work it out. I didn’t feel like telling him either; Earth had become so alien to me that I almost wanted to stay undercover, like it was all another roleplay on the holodeck.

The shuttle was noisier than it had been in the street, all the sound bouncing straight at me in the confined space. A baby was squealing up front. The woman from before offered me a boiled sweet as we sat in companionable silence. The children shouted at each other all the way (“Nasem! Stop kicking my seat!” “You first!”) and the two-minute journey couldn’t be over quick enough.

A weary looking tour guide in a mock Starfleet uniform was waiting in Voyager’s shuttle bay when we arrived. The room had a completely different feel than it had done before, with a carpeted path to walk on and all of the control panels and interfaces guarded by metal cages. A cleaner, stood mopping the floor in the corner, huffed at the two young boys as they ground their muddy shoes into the floor. From the looks of things, the staff were waiting to go home for the night. We were probably the last group of the day.

We were directed down the hall to a turbolift, which smelled of sweat and old farts. The tour guide – a blonde-haired Trill woman whose nametag read ‘Sazau,’ – commanded it to go to the Main Bridge. From the lack of a scowl on her face, I assumed she had already gotten used to the smell. Everybody else looked physically ill.

The bridge was nothing like it had used to be either. The conns had been ripped out and replaced with plastic-looking mockeries, unresponsive to touch and covered in flashing lights like children’s toys. The viewscreen was completely dark. I felt myself start to panic, looking around to find the officer in charge, and to recommend going to Red Alert – but we weren’t under attack. We were fine. This, apparently, was what we’d all been wishing for. Seven years of wishing. 

Voyager was a shell of what she had once been: not a ship, but a museum. Sazau was delivering what I’m sure was a well-rehearsed speech, but I couldn’t hear a single word of it over the screaming in my head. It was all wrong. Everything was all wrong. 

I stumbled back into the lift while everyone was distracted. “Deck Two?” Thankfully, it began to move. I leaned forwards to rest my head on the wall, defeated.

For some reason, I’d hoped that coming back would bring me closure. Instead, it was doing the opposite. Standing aboard the ship that had been my home for seven wonderful years, every inconsistency tore me up inside. There was no life here for me either. There was nowhere for me to be, nowhere to go, and nothing left for me to do.

Deck Two was pitch black. Regardless, I knew exactly where I was headed. It was thirty-seven steps down the hall, past the old quarters of Ensigns Ballard and Baytart, and right across from Ensign Kaplan. I felt my way across the wall. 

My door juddered open at my touch, and my bedside light flickered on. I smiled as I felt my eyes well up with tears – at least this room had missed me. I shouldered off my pack and put it on my desk chair. This was the first time since we’d landed that I truly felt at ease. This was my homecoming. Voyager should’ve never come back.

I took out my clarinet and put it to my lips. I could see Earth from my window, but that’s not what I wanted to see. I looked to the stars. I would play until they found me.


End file.
